Neil Gaiman teaches the art of storytelling

I listened to an audiobook version of this class and enjoyed it very much. 4/5 Stars.

War of the Worlds Global Dispatches edited by Kevin J Anderson

I had read most of these stories before but enjoyed re-reading them as well as the new ones.  The fun part, of course, is each talented writer's homage to the style, plotting, voice, and writing of each author to whom the stories are attributed.  Among my favorites is "Night of the Cooters" with the persona of Slim Pickins as a Texas Ranger, which I had read in 1987 in a magazine.  4/5 Stars.

Ghost Fleet by P W Singer & August Cole

I really enjoyed this one.  Well-scripted, lots of interesting "thriller" elements, gadgets, and a great war story.  5/5 Stars.

intelligence augmentation, intelligent infrastructure, & AI

Professor Jordan at Stanford wrote a really good description of how the terrible hype of "artificial intelligence" has prevented us from making important progress in engineering and more impactful computer science applications.  We all suffer from the systematic "bad statistics" anecdotes he describes, including our over-generalization from insufficient data.  The article is a little long and dated (2018) but highly recommended. 5/5 Stars

  

Forgotten Starship, Book 1 Exodus by M. R. Forbes

Good mystery, plot, and characters but terrible science & plot details (military protocol). I am curious about the space aliens and may read the next one, 2/5 Stars.

Rapid, Industrial Strength Spring Boot development & iteration

Richard Seroter (of MSDN fame) walks us through, step-by-step how to iterate on a containerized Java Spring Boot application using Google Cloud Run. Among the cool serendipitous side-effects he neglects to mention is cost savings.  Your application will autoscale up to whatever is needed in all resources;  More importantly your application will (very quickly) autoscale down to nearly nothing when resources are not needed.  This rapid development and iteration is a great example of realizing the promise of a public cloud and why on-premise systems are doomed.

The quest for better configuration languages

Configuration languages come into fashion and everyone embraces the language for everything, and then they disappear as the next concept gains traction.  XML was the answer; what was your question?  Does anyone remember tcl? 

The annual SPLASH conference is a gathering of people passionate about pursuing better ways of expressing our needs for configuration.  

Rebellion by Doc Spears, Jason Anspach, & Nick Cole

Slow, military fiction set in the Galaxy's Edge universe continues.  The "science" and magic system are quite bad so I shall probably not read the rest of the series. 2/5 Stars.

Anton loves SQLite and so should you

Anton Zhiyanov has written a delightful, open love letter about why SQLite is not a toy and you should use it more frequently in your production systems than you currently do.

Dark Operator by Doc Spears et al

A little slower and less sweeping than the rest of the stories in these books, with more character development and personal introspection. 3 / 5  Stars.